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Australian man bitten by python after waking up to find it 'slithering' over his neck
A man in Australia woke at 2am to find a snake “slithering” across his neck but escaped with a bite to the hand after throwing it to the floor.
Max Mason, 79, said he was asleep beside his wife in their house in Brisbane, in the state of Queensland, when he felt the three-foot carpet python moving across him.
"I felt a cold feeling slithering across the side of my neck,” he told ABC News. “It woke me up. I had the feeling it was a snake slithering across my neck.”
Mr Mason said he was surprised the creature made it into the bedroom because the house had screen doors to prevent snakes entering.
"I grabbed it and threw it on the floor and switched the bedroom light on and sure enough it was a snake," he said. “It was quite a shock, quite a surprise ... I think a bigger shock for my wife than myself.”
Mr Mason said his wife contained the snake with a plastic garbage bin. The couple plan to release it into the wild.
"I think it's a once-in-the-lifetime sort of thing, good heavens, you wouldn't expect a snake to be slithering across your neck in the night as a regular occurrence," he said.
"We've had tree snakes and pythons, the back of our house backs onto a cliff face, but nothing in the house of course."
Mr Mason was taken to hospital for 24 hours of monitoring.
“Our house is fully screened, it's surprising how anything ever got in there, but it got in," he said.
In a separate incident this week in a house just outside Brisbane, a carpet python was photographed being eaten by a deadly brown snake.
Carpet pythons are widespread across north-east Australia but – unlike many other Australian species are not venomous.
